Firefly-Host-6.0-CloudSDK fun in “modern” times

Getting started

Ugh. nothing like ancient crypto, major security vulnerabilities, and ancient crap. So first I’m going to use Juniper’s SDK (get it while you can, if you care). Note that the product is long since EOL’d, and all support is GONE. I’m using Debian 7 to perform this query, although I probably should be using something like 4 or 5. Anyways first off is that the python examples require “Ft.Xml.Domlette” which doesn’t seem to have a 4Suite-XML package. SO let’s build it the old fashioned way:

Naturally as time goes on this will not work anymore, and I’ll need a stale machine to query this stale service. Using ssl shopper’s Tomcat guide, I made changes to the server.xml file on the vGW SD VM. (Don’t forget to enable SSH in the settings WebUI, and then login as admin/<whatever password you gave> then do a ‘sudo bash’ to run as root, screw being nice!

And you get the idea. Certainly on the one hand it’s nice to get some data out of the vGW without using screen captures or anything else equally useless, and it sure beats trying to read stuff like this:

vGW VM effective policy for a VM

What on earth was Altor/Juniper thinking? Who thought making the screen damned near impossible to read was a “good thing”™

Naturally someone here is going to say, upgrade to the last version it’ll fix these errors, and sure it may, but are you going to bet a production environment that is already running obsolete software on changing versions? Or migrate to a new platform? Sure, the first step I’d want of course is a machine formatted rule export of the existing rules. And here we are.

2 thoughts on “Firefly-Host-6.0-CloudSDK fun in “modern” times”

> Naturally someone here is going to say, upgrade to the last version it’ll fix these errors,

I’d never say that, upgrading most things is painful 🙂

I just wanted to suggest that instead of using ‘wget’ through to ‘setup.py install’, perhaps you could set up a Python virtualenv and then do ‘pip install 4Suite-XML’ (I assume that’ll work given the URL you downloaded from) into that virtualenv so that you can isolate your locally-installed packages in a directory of your own instead of them ending up in /usr.

Considering 4Suite-XML is over 10 years old, I don’t see why it’s not some package to quickly get. It’s already in a VM, so I really don’t care where it installs the files, I guess I’m too old for ‘virtual directories’ of pollution in VM’s to wave wands into containers to really care….. More so how to even go thru the python shuffle of adding stuff, and how it’s added zero progress from the days of having to compile crap for perl..